Monday, January 7, 2013

Man, I hate doing that. Hacking up a last-minute feature and pushing it out to the live site with nowhere near enough testing. There needs to be a damn good reason to do that.

Sometime in the last week or so the NSW Rural Fire Service added a new field to their data feed. It's a field called "Instruction" that contains rather useful text like "There is a heightened level of threat. Conditions are changing and you need to start taking action now to protect you and your family."I swear that field wasn't there before. Looks like I'm not the only one still coding hard and fast for fire season.It's useful and important information. My framework is built to be adaptive in the face of changing data. It's taken longer to blog about than implement the code. But I still hate pushing features out that fast. It's way too easy to find yourself in a bugfix spiral or take down the site entirely.

I think I made the right decision.

Now if only the Vic fire service would add a similar field... Or the NT Fire service would provide a feed at all.